Fitted a new tap on the sink in the master bathroom. Compared to the nonsense involved in the pond filter saga yesterday this was a nicely uneventful task!

Other than that mostly been clearing up after the decorating from the last couple of weeks. It's astonishing how much debris decorating a house creates!

Also got attacked with a pair of scissors and the trimmer...now my hair is considerably shorter. This I am okay with, as it was at that massively annoying length where you couldn't quite tie it back, but it managed to get in your eyes and mouth every five seconds. Especially if you drive with the car windows open. As I usually do (heck, if I didn't know it would get me pulled over I would probably stick my head out there like a dog...).

Only other notable activity was giving the side lawn its first cut of the year. ...by which I actually mean that I used the mower as a garden vac to pick up all the leaves, pebbles and bits of stick the dog has dragged in there over the winter...

Bits of stick........ That makes me laugh. Living out here in the woods, with people that raise cattle around, it's not uncommon for a farmer to drag a dead cow out to the corner of the pasture and just leave it. So instead of bits of stick my dog carries home cow leg bones and once even a skull. No dragging here; he will kill, pick up and carry home 25+ pound armadillos and other critters he can catch. Luckily, to date this has never included a skunk. A groundhog that weighed about 30 pounds, yes, but no skunk.

__________________All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

(note the "helper" by the door who spent a large portion of the time carrying things off and generally getting under my feet at every opportunity...)

Into this...

Basically it's where everything got thrown when we were decorating, and then got ignored for a week.

Also attacked the windows with new weather stripping, so the place is now about 80% more weather proof, though I still have one window to do because I ran out of strips. Will do that tomorrow.

Oh, and changed the lamp in one of the floodlights outside which had been struggling to start since we moved in last April. Tomorrow will try to do everything I had planned to do today, but ended up not getting done because restoring order in the Purple Room took all day!

On the plus side, at least now that's done I have access to my stereo again. I've not rattled next door's windowframes in at least two weeks, and that just won't do.

(I'm kidding of course, very little sound makes it to the outside world and I've nothing against my next door neighbours, but I do like my music!).

Nor is it really dog safe. We're still waiting for the first singed tail incident.

It's a nice space, though we still need to decide what to do with it. I comandeered some space for my stereo, but it's largely just used as a store for things that don't have a home anywhere else at the moment. It's nice in the summer because it feels as though you're in the garden. Being north facing as well it's a bit cooler than the rest of the house which is welcome in the summer as this place gets quite toasty.

Another good evening out at the ice hockey. MK-Lightning 3 - Guildford Flames 2.

I'll take that, always fun getting a good win at home. Looked like it was going to be a lot heavier scoring game judging from the first period, and it continued to be pretty frantic but with few actual goals later.

Still good fun though.

Got a bunch of fellow lighting geeks coming around tomorrow for a chat and sort of mini swap-meet. So will be interesting to see how that goes.

Football (soccer) is still GBP20 ish after the discount, which compared to the hockey seems stupidly expensive...especially given how much more fun and exciting the hockey is in comparison!

The average hockey ticket in Finland costs about 60 euros for top league games, but then, we've won the World Championship twice (1995 and 2011). The English team did win the Olympics in 1936, but most of the players were the children of British expats living in Canada, so they had grown up in a hockey-playing culture. Hockey fans are relatively few in number in the UK, so they have to fill the seats somehow, with reasonably cheap tickets probably being the easiest way to do it.

__________________Decaf coffee is an oxymoron. Instant coffee is an abomination. Give me the real thing and nobody gets hurt.
"Do. Or do not. There is no try" -- Yoda
VP of the Afra Lyon fan club!

"How about something in a weave called Elfen or perhaps Elfweave. This one can even be made in a continuous loop, with no clasp.

Either could have a pendant added, perhaps a custom wire-wrapped moonstone cabochon.

Did I mention I have a moonstone cabochon, and another, prettier one on the way?

Why do you ask? Hehehehehehe."

Both of them are very lovely. I ask because in August I am going to the Labyrinth of Jared in LA. It is a two night masquerade ball. On the first night I plan to go as an elf probably nobility and I would need something lovely to go with it. As long as there is no nickel in it I could wear it.
On the second night I plan to be a fairy.
I have wanted to go to this for over 10 years. I am going this year with or without my friends as a long overdue present to myself.
I would love to buy my accessories from someone I know.

Currently, I am barely keeping myself afloat between grad school, work, the boys, and my dad, but I am managing.

Lovely room, Zelandeth.

__________________
"In dreams your spirit visits higher realms and watches over the shaping of this reality. That is why dreams have power and why sometimes they show the future." The Secret Sky by Jeanine Berry

Replaced the rotten and torn to bits netting over the pond so that the fish don't fall victim to passing foxes, cats or herons. Did a count and came to the usual total of somewhere between nine and twelve (they are really hard to count!), so we don't seem to have lost any. Have also made a bit of a change to the filter arrangements so that the return water passes through a bucket before being returned to the pond proper in the hope that it will act as a settling chamber to capture some of the crud before the water is returned. Hopefully it will settle there rather than in the pond. Given the amount of winter grime I fished out there today I had stirred quite a lot up from the bed after all so it might do some good. Not least the stones from around the edge of the pond that the dog managed to shove in there last week.

Need to pick up some more plants for the pond given that none of the ones that we put in there last year never seemed to take.

Moonlady, let me get back to you. I have an idea, but I want to check it out first.

I look forward to seeing your idea. We have time as the event is not till Aug. Even though the date has been set, the event planner is still keeping it secret.

I'm taking care of my dad this weekend and it is a difficult because he refuses to cooperate at times. I understand it comes from his anger and frustration at needing help. He has always been the one to take care of his family. Even after my parents divorce, when I was six, he still took care of me and my mom. He paid for her health insurance till the day she remarried when I was 13. Even then, when my stepdad and mom were about to lose their home leaving me and my sister homeless, he loaned them the money to keep it and though her intentions where to pay it back it never occurred. My dad never said a thing. She was the one to tell me when I was grown. When my step mom was blind for over 2 years and going through major eye surgeries, my dad set the house up for her so she would be okay and have her meals when he was at the fire station. This is just a small list. So I understand his anger and frustrations. At the same time, when he keeps going till he almost passes out on me or refuses to put his oxygen back on because he doesn't like how it feels, I become scared and angry because if he falls, I can't lift him and without his oxygen his O2 becomes precariously low. So we argue a lot and he apologizes later saying I just need to work with him. I respond that I will be he needs to be willing to compromise with me. He is currently sleeping because he wore himself out yesterday.

May everyone who celebrates have a beautiful Easter!May everyone who celebrates have a freeing Passover! If I missed any holidays, then may those I misses mentioning be wonderful!

My Passover this year is having the opportunity to lovingly serve and take care of my dad who watched over me even after I grew up and started a family of my own. My dad has and does show me unconditional love and what it means to cherish and believe in the ones you love.

__________________
"In dreams your spirit visits higher realms and watches over the shaping of this reality. That is why dreams have power and why sometimes they show the future." The Secret Sky by Jeanine Berry

Life moves in mysterious ways at times and it seems books and booklet do, too Today I received the following email:

Quote:

Hans,

A forum post which you made in 2008 spoke to me across the years and I wanted to respond. The Subject was "Boxing day in August."

But let me give you the back story and how it wrapped some things up for me.

I was going through books to select those to remove from my collection and give to a charity book drive which my step daughter is involved with. I was going through a box of paperbacks to see which might be duplicates and which are ones which I am unlikely to read again. The first 20 or so books were all familiar, but then I ran across a cover that looked unfamiliar and was not a book which I would be likely to buy.

The next book was The White Dragon and I compared it to the paperback on my shelf to see which one was in better shape, only to discover that the book was signed to Richard (my wife's late first husband) by Anne McCaffrey. When I showed it to my wife, there was a little confusion, because he had traveled to few conventions where books would be signed and Anne had not attended ConQuesT, the principal local convention in Kansas City.

I thought I remembered hearing that Anne had been a guest at FoolCon at our local community college a few years before I moved to the area and searched Google for Anne McCaffrey Foolcon.

Your post that I mention above was the first result. You talk about a FoolCon program book from 1980 when Anne had been a guest. You are pointed out that book at been autographed, "To Bea" by Anne McCaffrey.

Wow! Bea Owens was a dear friend who passed away about 15 years ago. We attended many conventions together.

After Bea passed away, some of her books were sold and I purchased several of them. I was particularly excited about her autographed hardcover 1st Edition of the White Dragon. When I was paying for the books, I told the lady running the sale that it would replace the hardcover edition which I had lost a few years before in a divorce. Losing books in a divorce resonated with that woman and she refused to let me pay for it. It sits proudly on my bedroom shelf and I keep a paperback to read and not damage that special edition.

Thank you for filling in the information that completes a circle between Bea, Richard and me!

The blog post Keith talks about was apost in the collector's forum here. I replied and asked him if I could post his email here, which was OK.

Dear Keith,

Well, with me living in The Netherlands and having been a personal friend of Anne since about the year 2000 this makes for a special story indeed. Believe you me, she would have been thrilled by stories like these. she loved hearing about her books touching people in more ways what than a good book does for a reader. First of April she would have been 89 and I am glad, so very glad, I was able to visit her on her 85th birthday. We did not know then that it would be her last. As you will know from the blog post I have a very extensive Anne McCaffrey collection and that FoolCon progam book has a special place in it because I think, from the top of my head, it also has the autograph of Stephen Donaldson, another author I hold dear.

Cheers!
Hans

__________________Hans, also known as Elrhan, Master Archivist

Visit The Pern Museum & Archives for all your Pern and Anne McCaffrey News and Resources!
The Pern Museum & Archives is the home of the Pern Encyclopedia and the Pern Bloodlines.

Thank you Hans for sharing. It was a bright spot in my day. Today has been hard in that I am currently operating on less than 4 hours sleep and caffeine which will not be remedied until I return home. My dad woke up at 3:30 AM wanting breakfast at Dennys. His grandson was not interested which upset him because he loves to provide for those he loves. I tried to explain that a teenage is not likely even for free food to want to get up that early. He grumbled and roomed around his room till 5 AM when Crazy Otto's open. I drove there to pick up breakfast to go. He finally fell into a fitful sleep about 3 hours ago. I've stayed up because he wakes up often, disoriented and I want to be nearby. I relieved my step mom this weekend so she could rest because she is the main person caring for my dad. I am glad for that because as much as I would love to be able to do it, I work full time and I've two teenagers to finish socializing. What I do is try to relieve her so she is able to rest, refresh, and take care of herself too.

Thank you everyone for reading my posts. Other than a few close friends and this forum, I am not saying much about my dad. Thanks again for helping me through this difficult time.

May everyone have a blessed week!

__________________
"In dreams your spirit visits higher realms and watches over the shaping of this reality. That is why dreams have power and why sometimes they show the future." The Secret Sky by Jeanine Berry

Okay, after all the caffeine I drank to stay awake till my step mom returned and so I could safely drive home, I am still awake at almost 1 AM CA time. It may take me some time before I'm back to my normal schedule.

Thanks again.

__________________
"In dreams your spirit visits higher realms and watches over the shaping of this reality. That is why dreams have power and why sometimes they show the future." The Secret Sky by Jeanine Berry

Coffee is So good! I am lucky, a couple cups a day does not seem to affect how I sleep at night.

Silly question/comment. Bedroom doors have locks, so do shared bathrooms. I'm ok with that. Why is there a lock on our master bathroom door? Only Jeff and I use it and "modesty"?! Not after 35+ years of marriage. Seems kind of silly. Btw, it was like this when we bought the place, I would not have done it this way!

__________________What we have once enjoyed we can never lose.
All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
Helen Keller

Been moderately busy over the last few days, though a good portion of it has just been catching up with some day to day tasks and nothing too interesting.

Tesla, our dog went to the vet's last week to have a certain operation undertaken to put an end to his insistence in getting entirely too friendly with anyone or anything which stayed still for long enough. Our research has tended to suggest that there are several long-term health benefits for him, and let's face it, there are already far too many dogs in the world.

Result of this however has been that we've needed to keep half an eye on him for the last few days to make sure that he's not licking at his stitches. He's generally been very good about that, but for at least a couple of days was really not happy about the patch of his foreleg that had been shaved for the IV. We did have to result to putting on the buster collar for a couple of nights as he just would not leave it alone. He *really* doesn't like that though, so we've only used it as a last resort. At nights though for the last few days we've had him in our room, which in conjunction with the fact that he utterly insists on sleeping upside-down has lead to a large number of extremely cute and/or silly dog pictures being taken.

Here he is trying to force me to fall out of bed. There is nobody here but him and me, and that's a king size bed. Yet my legs are in the six inches of bed to the right of the frame. Bed hog!

Just to prove it's not a one off - here's another one of him completely out for the count. If there's one thing he is not, it's stressed out!

He's actually been as good as gold in the bedroom (which is good, as this was a bit of a trial run for the summer when he'll need to be in there with us so he can take advantage of the A/C as it will probably be too warm for him otherwise), even if he is a bit of a bed hog, and managed to bodily land on my chest once, just about knocking the wind out of me.

Speaking of summer, it seems that the warmer week or so we've had here has started to bring more summery creatures out. This beautiful Red Admiral butterfly was kind enough to stay still long enough to snap a photo while I was out walking Tesla the other day.

Day before yesterday I finally got around to fitting some new old stock lights into the Atrium, replacing the early 2000s "highly fashionable" things that were in there consuming stupid amounts of power and producing about as much useful light as a candle. What has gone in is contemporary with the house, and despite now drawing only 16W per unit (there are four in total), the overall lighting level is about five times greater - to the extent that you can actually use the room in after dark now.

Sorting the lighting out spurred me on to also sort out a few other things on the to do list, not least sorting out this corner, as it was seriously bugging my sense of OCD, and was a pain to clean around.

We got a cue rack along with the pool table a year ago, but I had never got off my lazy tail for long enough to actually install it. Still having the masonry drill bits out from doing the lights, it seemed a logical time to fit it. The corner now looks like this:

Much better. A couple of surplus cues have been put into storage (my own one lives in a case elsewhere), and the rack there has sizes to suit most people who visit regularly, and has space for the rest and spider. It also means the dog doesn't knock them over every other day now, which is also a marked improvement.

Also on the subject of the Atrium, I finally got around to starting to fit the automatic window openers to the roof vents, the first of which took most of the day today to do.

Doesn't look massively far up in that photo - but it's a good twenty feet up, and feels a lot more when you're teetering at the top of the ladder! It's been a right faff to do really because everything you really need two hands for, which means very, very slow and steady work when you're up a ladder. Was also complicated by the discovery that that bit of the roof frame is aluminium, not wood as expected. So I had to drill and tap everything rather than just sticking a few screws in. It's also *really* hot up there (hence the need for the opening roof vents!).

In other news, one of our housemates who works in the automotive industry came home at lunchtime a couple of days ago in this:

Sadly we only had it for the afternoon, but at least it was a nice sunny afternoon so we were able to go for a decent run with the top down. Made me very abruptly remember how much I miss owning a convertible. Was surprising how well mannered it was, as performance focused cars like the F-type can often be a real pain around town and in the real world. While the ride is pretty firm, it surprised us all by being very well behaved though. Provided you don't ever need to reverse it with the roof up, I can see it being a car that would be pretty easy to live with.

Definitely a car that will be going on the "consider if we win the lottery" list.

Think that's about it for my latest update!

("Thank goodness, that's enough of your rambling!" I hear you all saying! Don't worry...sure there will be more soon!).

Edit: Also just solved the issue with embedded Photobucket images failing to load in Opera 12.x which had been bugging me for a month. If it affects anyone here let me know and I'll talk you through it. Takes about two minutes to do.

Proper A/C is something we will be getting installed here at some point in the next few years, but not right now as it will be anything but a cheap job, especially given how long some of the pipework runs will have to be. Couple of rooms lack windows opening to the outside world, so they are probably going to be the first ones to be done.

Will have to be a split system here as retrofitting central air would just be prohibitively expensive, and in the case of a couple of rooms probably outright impossible down to there being nowhere to route ductwork.

Beautiful car, home, and dog, Zelandeth. Thank you for sharing. One day I hope to fly over the "pond" and visit.

__________________
"In dreams your spirit visits higher realms and watches over the shaping of this reality. That is why dreams have power and why sometimes they show the future." The Secret Sky by Jeanine Berry

Sorry, Allen. I haven't had a chance to look much because I've two major papers due in two weeks for graduate school. I promise to spend some time looking by this Sunday. My plans for my spring break did not happen the way I planned.

__________________
"In dreams your spirit visits higher realms and watches over the shaping of this reality. That is why dreams have power and why sometimes they show the future." The Secret Sky by Jeanine Berry

According to a local news channel's list of hurricane names my son Fred gets a hurricane this year. I told his sister that if we get to that many storms so there IS a "hurricane Fred" we should get him a t-shirt printed for Christmas!

__________________What we have once enjoyed we can never lose.
All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
Helen Keller

According to a local news channel's list of hurricane names my son Fred gets a hurricane this year. I told his sister that if we get to that many storms so there IS a "hurricane Fred" we should get him a t-shirt printed for Christmas!

Perhaps you should also order a few that say, "I survived Hurricane Fred!" even if they never use the name ...

__________________
I know you think you understood what you think I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

There's a character round here who insists on walking round town dressed as a storm-trooper. The only problem is that they're only 5 foot tall instead of 6 foot plus. Just recently they've taken to wearing a skirt over the armour (I really must try to get a photo of them) so possibly it's a female inside using it as a future-proof burka and hijab.

__________________"Truth is stranger than fiction: fiction has to make sense." Leo Rosten.

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." C. S. Lewis

"I find television very educational. Whenever somebody switches it on I go in the other room and read a book." (attributed to Groucho Marx)

Coffee is So good! I am lucky, a couple cups a day does not seem to affect how I sleep at night.

Silly question/comment. Bedroom doors have locks, so do shared bathrooms. I'm ok with that. Why is there a lock on our master bathroom door? Only Jeff and I use it and "modesty"?! Not after 35+ years of marriage. Seems kind of silly. Btw, it was like this when we bought the place, I would not have done it this way!